Why Harris is still at risk in swing states

For anyone who didn’t get to hear the FT Live post-debate event with myself, Lauren Fedor, Gideon Rachman and Peter Spiegel, you have a second chance, in the form of the FT Swamp Notes podcast. It’s worth listening, because I thought that the team got down to some essential topics on the election, namely that winning a debate isn’t the same as winning the presidential race.

Many people who read the FT will probably wonder why the race is still so tight in Midwestern swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Biden, after all, did so much to close the gap between Democrats and Republicans in those states by being unequivocally pro-union and — perhaps even more importantly — really pushing home the point that America must reindustrialise, and protect factory jobs.

Harris is doing very little talking about either of those things. I was so struck during the debate that in the very first question she answered, she raised the issue of the Trump tariffs being a “sales tax” on Americans, since it would increase the price of imported goods. To be clear, I don’t support Trump’s across the board tariffs, and I know he has no industrial strategy at all. But like many Americans, particularly those outside the coasts, I think tariffs aren’t verboten; they are simply one of many economic tools that can be deployed as a way of achieving certain economic aims that the market isn’t delivering. That’s basically what they have been in every period in American economic history, with the small and rare exception of the 1990s onwards (for more on that, see Barry Lynn’s Liberty from All Masters.

But what I can say for sure: when you talk about tariffs as a “sales tax,” working people in the industrial Midwest don’t hear that as a rallying cry against inflation. They hear it as proof that Harris doesn’t necessarily have their back, and won’t necessarily protect their jobs. As I mentioned in the FT event, I’ve been hearing for a couple of weeks now from labour movement sources that they are seeing some wobbling of support in key swing states because Harris isn’t simply showing up and saying: “I’ve got your back, and I’ll protect your jobs, no matter what.”

Indeed, she’s going to places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan and not talking about manufacturing at ALL, which is a major own-goal. It’s fine to push child care, home affordability and small business assistance. But factory workers in Michigan aren’t necessarily interested in a $50,000 loan to become an entrepreneur. They want to know that they aren’t going to be sold out by Democrats as they were during the Clinton years.

Some of the policy elites advising Harris may think that talking about Bidenomics is toxic, since there is a perception that it didn’t help Biden. But while the language of industrial policy and the post-neoliberal era still needs finessing, the fact is that the Biden-Harris supply side revolution has worked — the US has had by far the best recovery of any rich country, we’re heading for a soft landing in both labour markets and capital markets, and the Democrats have done much in the last three years to re-establish themselves as the party of working people. If Harris can’t or won’t own all that, something is wrong (and if I were a Democratic politico, I’d be worried that the Trump team would finally get their act together and make hay with that).

What’s more, as former National Security Council international economics adviser Jen Harris wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece, there is SO much overlap between what Harris cares about, and what the Biden Build Back Better agenda is about. The vice-president should own what has already been built, in the form of manufacturing and infrastructure, connect that to her own housing policies in a more nuanced way (see my column on that here) and then talk about what must STILL be built in the service sector — the revamping of the care economy, the restructuring of tax policy to support families.

Peter, you and I disagree on many economic approaches, but let me ask you a political question: if Harris isn’t more supportive of manufacturing and industrial policy, how the heck can she ever expect to win the three states she really needs?

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Peter Spiegel responds

Rana, we’ve hashed out here in Swamp Notes before where we disagree on economic policy. It now looks like we can also disagree on political tactics! 

I spent four years in Philadelphia during my college days, so it’s a state that I’ve kept tabs on for some time. You’re right that working-class whites are a key swing vote — one of my first FT stories was about a blue-collar Irish-Catholic family in the state; the daughter was an Al Gore-backing social worker, her brother was a George W Bush-supporting anti-abortion activist, and their mother was an undecided retiree. That one family encapsulated how split Pennsylvania’s old “Reagan Democrat” constituency you talk about has become.

But in my mind, there is a more important voting bloc Harris needs to address in Pennsylvania, as well as in Michigan and Wisconsin: suburban women. There are far more votes to be had in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs — as well as the affluent suburbs of Detroit and Milwaukee — than the prototypical manufacturing workers who have fallen out of love with the Democratic party over economic issues like international trade. Getting those women — many of whom lean Republican on economic issues like taxes and regulation, but have become turned off by Trump on abortion and his personal behaviour — to the polls on election day is the key to winning in November.

What we have seen since the 2016 election, in which suburban voters either failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton or surprised pollsters by voting for Trump due to so-called “Clinton fatigue”, is that they have come roaring back into the Democratic column in both 2020 and in the 2022 midterms because of their distaste for Trump. Take Montgomery County, the suburban Philadelphia county that has come to symbolise this nationwide shift. Biden won nearly 65,000 more votes there in 2020 than Clinton did in 2016 — en route to winning the state by just 80,000 votes. 

Similarly, a major reason Democrats were able to limit the size of the Republican majority in the House in 2022 was because of results in these same kinds of suburban districts. Michigan’s 7th district, which takes in some of Detroit’s leafy suburbs, went for Trump in 2016, but for Biden in 2020 — and shocked prognosticators by returning Democrat Elise Slotkin to Congress in 2022 despite being high on Republican target lists. 

It is in these districts where issues like child care, home affordability and small business assistance resonate, as well as abortion. Tariffs and protectionist trade policies are exactly the kind of economic issues that push these voters into the Republican column. That’s why Harris is not talking about them when she shows up in the “Blue Wall” states. And I think that’s probably the right thing to do.